


lady skywalker

by dread_thehalfhanded



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Ficlet, Genderswap, an old ficlet I dragged out since I decided to start publishing on here, fem!Anakin, fem!vader, star wars but genderbent you feel me?, this is basically just a series of thoughts on so what if anakin skywalker had been a girl?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 18:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13300332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dread_thehalfhanded/pseuds/dread_thehalfhanded
Summary: what if shmi skywalker had a daughter instead of a son?Your favorite space opera, but genderbent.





	lady skywalker

Anakin Skywalker, daughter of Shmi Skywalker, born alone on a desert world to a life of slavery. She works in the junkyards first, alongside her mother, when she is old enough to walk and carry, learning the names and functions of every part they sell. One day she sneaks into a racer, and stuns Watto enough to let her race—but not enough so he won’t beat her. From then on, she lives for the racetrack, seizing any opportunity to get away from the shop and to take flight, to fly in the way she does, where her hands take over and she doesn’t even have to think. She just knows.

The Jedi come when she is nine, a man and a demure young woman. She eagerly offers to fly for them, and the older one shakes his head, wondering. They whisper behind doors and look sideways at her, running little tests and asking her questions. Secretly, Anakin is disappointed. The gentle brown-eyed boy trailing behind them, however, is more interesting. He looks her in the eyes, and does not murmur about her when he thinks she is not listening.

She wins their race, and Qui-Gon gets his ship.

In return, he offers her freedom, or at least a different sort of servitude. Join us, he tells her, kneeling to look her in the face, for the first time. A temple, a sword, another planet. It’s not a choice, really—when the cage is opened, does the bold bird hesitate? Anakin learns to fly.

And, for a while, the training is enough. Until it is not.

Anakin learns to harness all the power of the Force within her, but under masters too slow and steeped in corruption for her liking. She grows tall and broad, all impulse and fire and snarl. Obi-Wan alone is dear to her, they are close enough in age that her own Master’s hand does not seemed quite like a master, but a friend. The two women grow side by side, the measured and the reckless.

When Anakin is nineteen, Senator Amidala returns to Coruscant. Kenobi greets him as an old friend, with a bow and a smile. Anakin stares at him, unable to think of anyone but the little gentle boy on Tatooine, and flounders through introductions. His robes of state are off-putting, and everything from his stance to his delicate crown demands respect—but his sweet brown eyes say I remember. He’s grown taller, and perhaps firmer of step and of word, but he is every inch the young king she knew. Afterwards, she throws half a jealous eye at Kenobi, who pretends not to notice. She always did have a tongue for these things.

In the months that follow, Anakin guards the senator day and night, watching his sleeping and waking. The way the purpose of his hands is always towards his people. He is so good, she thinks. And he is not for me. Not for her, with her wicked dreams in the dark ever-creeping, and the power that screams in her chest sometimes from being held too long, too close. Yet his smiles are for her, too, in the sunny gardens of Naboo.

When she kisses him by the lake, it is desperation without hope. When he kisses her, in the chariot on Geonosis, she doesn’t see how the Jedi could ever forbid this. With this fire in her blood, she is the most herself she’s ever been. She feels all the Jedi they’ve never quite let her be. She spends that battle and the following duel drunk on it. He is good, and he knows me, and he still wants me.

I am good.

They are married by the lake, just before the war.

The war is a blur of missions and men, always another planet to save, always urged to do your best, to save lives—but forbidden from doing too much. Never allowed to prevent anything like this from happening again. The Separatists always return, always again with the death and the killing—but never enough killing. Never enough to make an end. Anakin fights as she is told, as she has always fought, with joy in the doing, but it is not right. She sees Padme occasionally, and he seems to believe the war is just. That makes it easier, sometimes. Other times, when the rage is on her, she wants nothing more than to wash her hands of this whole dirty business, and kill them all.

  
Power storms in her, when the Order lies, when even Kenobi keeps secrets, when her apprentice Ashoka is abandoned and ostracized by the system that raised her. Anakin seethes. She is meant to be an avenging fury of the Light, come as Chosen One to right the balance, and this, this is the Jedi Order. These are the fools who call themselves good men and wise, who think to right the galaxy. They can do nothing. They are afraid.

  
She rants like this to the Chancellor, once, but the look in his empty white eyes scares her. He smiles when she is done and asks her to just be careful. Just as she is leaving, he says quietly,

“I understand, dear girl.”

She pauses and turns on the threshold, shocked at the familiar term. He is staring intently at her, and gestures towards the senate doors. Something in her Force conscious self flickers.

“I understand.”

Anakin nods, once, curtly, and leaves. Politicians play a finicky game, and she respects anyone who has the patience to play it with them. Palpatine is wise with such things.  
On her infrequent visits home, she lies coiled in Padme’s arms, her dark hair loose on his chest, and only then feels safe. He is good, she reasons. He knows. The systems are flawed, yes, but surely this war is for good and not for ill. In the end, it will be over and it will be right. They do not often speak waking of the war, but it hangs heavy in the air between them.

Darkness grows over everything, near the end. Grievous is a welcome distraction from the weight of it, pressing on her consciousness, beating on her mind waking, running rampant in her dreams. She sees her husband dying again and again, by his own hand, by her hand. To keep those you love most from dying… Palpatine offers her nothing that she does not already have, she reasons. After several nights of waking nauseous and shaking, she approaches Yoda about it, in vague terms, but he counsels her only to let go.

“Grief, attachment causes, let it go, must you. Be at peace,” he says, eyeing her with something akin to suspicion.

She veils her scorn and bows respectfully. “Thank you, Master.”

This counsel seems the height of weakness to her mind. Just not caring does not a problem solve, Master Yoda. She growls at the night, as is her wont, speeding back to Amidala’s apartment.

She is sick again that night, and Amidala suggests, tactfully, as she has the last three times this has happened on her bedroom floor, that Anakin see a medical droid. She starts to refuse again, but is interrupted by her own body. Amidala shepherds her into his own speeder, and shuts the door.

The droid says she’s pregnant.

Her entire body clenches and recoils in horror. She rips the droid’s sensors from her arm and swings her legs off the bench, her boots firm on the ground. This can’t happen.

She can’t look at Amidala, can’t see his hope and tell him she won’t keep his child. She can’t.

“Three months,” he says, wondering. He doesn’t sound angry.

How could she have not known? She glances up at him, stricken. He smiles, puts an arm around her shoulder.

“This is wonderful,” he says, kissing her cheek. “I told you we should have come earlier.”

It hasn’t even occurred to him. She has to fight, to keep leading her men, to bring an end to the war. Jedi don’t get maternity leave. They don’t even get marriage. Keeping it is out of the question.

“Padme,” she chokes out, “I can’t keep it.”

He holds her against his chest as she cries, and strokes her hair.

“I know,” he says quietly.

The silence hangs for a moment before he continues. “But there are incubators. If you wanted.”

She looks up at him. “I can never claim it, you know. It will be your child. Never mine.”

He nods. “I know.”  
She lets her breath out, slowly, and looks down at her belly. You can’t see anything, not yet. She touches it, gently, experimentally.

“But we would know.”

He nods, eagerness bright behind his eyes. “Yes.”

She smiles, and takes his hand. “Okay.”

The next day, Kenobi approaches her after Council, cautious like a reluctant predator. They’ve asked her to play emissary, Anakin can smell it on her. Her gut lurches, and she nearly covers it with her hand protectively. But there’s nothing there.

Kenobi is brief, her gaze unsteady. The Council will seat Anakin. But no Mastership. And they want her to spy on the Chancellor.

Clearly, Kenobi does not want this either. They’ve spoken little outside of missions, since the fiasco of her faked death, but Anakin would know that look anywhere. Still, that does not make the blow come any easier.

“Put me on the Council and not make me a Master?!”

Her voice is thick and not like her voice at all. And Kenobi knows, hears the unspoken. What is left wanting?

Kenobi shakes her head, as a woman who has chosen the lesser of two evils.

“I’m sorry.”

Anakin snarls, disgusted.

The Chancellor offers much more material aid. He offers her a seat, politely, and then, speaking like an equal promises her not more power, but simply the opportunity to use that which resides within her already. Anakin listens, enthralled, to the vision he weaves, of a world where great men may use what power is theirs to command without bowing to those who fear it. A vision where the world would be hers to bend, to command, to use for protection of those she held dear. She thought of the children, two tiny fragile bubbles left floating in an incubator in Amidala’s bedroom.

This man before her could save them. But he could also end this war, once and for all. Or she could. He has confessed himself the main mover of both sides, and now is his hour, come what may, she thinks. She runs.

In the hangar, she tells them everything, Yoda, Windu, Kenobi, nearly stuttering in her haste to get it all out, to prove her trustworthiness once and for all. The Chancellor, the red saber, his claim to be the Dark Lord of the Sith, the whole long improbable tale. They believe her, they send a group to arrest him—but when she asks to join, begs them, nearly, to let her help, she is denied. They do not trust her.

Still, after all of this, after all she just gave up for this Order, for this cause, they will not trust her.

She sits in the council room alone, brooding. This order has rotted from the inside out.

She thinks of Amidala, of their children that he watches over even now, as she cannot. As I cannot? Pinned as I am to this Order. The question presses at her mind, why, why, why? Why stay? This is my home? But what is left here to hold to? What is left here that I could ever love or fight for again?

They do not want me. They have never wanted me.

I will save that which I do love.

I will save him.

And she runs to Palpatine. She chooses power over the rotting system that betrayed her, leaving behind mentor, apprentice, and friends, to what end she knows not.

Tears whirl amid the lava when she faces Obi-Wan on Mustafar. (Her master. Her friend.)

Eons pass in the reconstruction room, as the bots build a body of metal around her. Thoroughly destroyed, they tell her. She would expect nothing less from Kenobi. Her children. Her children are gone, Palpatine tells her. She would expect nothing less from him. Vader, he calls her.

Who?

Senator Amidala doesn’t recognize her when she comes to kill him. Why would he?

The Order falls, as promised, but the cleansing fury Vader dreamed of bringing never comes. Innocents still die, just more of them now. The government is less corrupt, but only because it all belongs to one man. The now-Empire screams under Palpatine’s claw. She wonders if Padme was right, about democracy. About people. But there’s nothing to do now save soldier on. She chose this path.

Years pass. Ten, fifteen, why count? Her steel joints do not stiffen. Her heart does. All the passion she once knew retreats callous and cold behind the mask, comforting in its monstrosity. Hope hardens like lead in her charred gut.

Some officer, of some importance, brings her reports of a rebellion. Dully, she wonders how the Emperor will extinguish the one. Fire or gas? Starvation or annihilation? Capture the leader and watch them scatter? Or make another example of them all? By this point, she and Palpatine rarely speak, except to give and accept orders. (Once, she had a real master. A friend.) He seems loath to incite her. She could care less either way. Take the Prince. Retrieve the plans. Dimly, she recalls rumors of another construction project.

Maybe he’s building a moon this time.

The boy reminds Vader of herself at that age. All fire. All do-gooder smack and rash vows too big for his pert white boots. She hates him, as she has not hated in seventeen years. There’s a little niggle at the back of her force-sensitive consciousness, telling her why. But she’s never been prone to over-analyzing.

A weathered Kenobi presents herself, inexplicably, to Vader’s scarlet blade. Her swordsmanship is nothing like the clash of sweat and fire on Mustafar, infantile, even—but Vader doesn’t ask. Doesn’t ask why it’s been so long, doesn’t ask why now, doesn’t ask why there’s no body. Doesn’t care.

And then the girl. Heaven knows where she got that sword, a Skywalker lightsaber, but she comes with her rage and her accusations and her torment, and Anakin knows her child. Knows that Palpatine lied. Knows that hope is not dead and the niggle at the back of her head explodes into a torrent of all their rage, fueling them both—and she severs her daughter’s hand. It’s what Vader would do.

Silence. An empty calm, without a flicker of presence across the force.

And then she comes again. Taller and darker now, and brave. A walk without apologies. She looks at Vader with sorrow. Kindness. Pity. Vader recoils against the pity like a dog too long stray. It’s the only way she finds the will to fight her daughter again, hand whole. Leia is strong.

It doesn’t take long. A clash and a spray of sparks, and she takes Vader’s hand, the sword hand, the right hand, as if in recompense. And steel wrists still feel pain. The Emperor starts to pay attention, beyond the idle interest of a gentleman at bridge. He hadn’t looked at Vader like that in years, like he saw a future. Like he saw hope.

Her daughter stands before Palpatine, alone. Hearing the same speech she heard years ago, before all the black and the metal and the little rivets across her breast. Same song, different verse. Still a melody of empires built on the rot of rage and desire for dominion, of empty cups and spattered bodies wrought to life again by the inexorable limitless hand of Palpatine the Deathless and his Chosen Skywalker-

“Never. I am a Jedi, like my mother before me.”

Leia’s voice is quiet and firm, like her father’s when he spoke to the cross-eyed cats that lined the dome of the Senate in the last days. Like Vader’s never was. Always too loud, too much passion—Blue lightning crackles through the black heart of the Death Star. The Emperor is smiling, parched and yellow and filling Leia with wild light, beating her body with his dark magic.

Her cries fall on Anakin’s ears as though it was the night she was born.

“Please. Mother.”

Vader rises. Stands beside the master who was no master, the Dark Lord who was no lord, and as he drew back to cast again, she grasped him tight in both arms and lifted. Up, and up, and up, white light burning through her steel circuits and soldered nerves, shivering with strain, she lifted Palpatine away from her daughter, and half-dragged, half-carried him, now both enveloped in blue energy and pain, to his favorite architectural accent: a gaping uncovered abyss on the throne room floor.

He fell, still shimmering, like so much refuse, down the pit of his own making.

Anakin falls too, half-kneeling, to the floor beside her daughter. Skin still singed and smoking, Leia cradles her mother’s oversized helmet, and lays her down, slender fingers already working at the clasps. Anakin, tears seeping for the first time in nineteen years, smiled beneath her mask.

“My daughter,” she rasps, “help me see.”

**Author's Note:**

> so this is an old concept I wrote up before the release of TFA, because the idea of Anakin as a furious and betrayed mother wouldn't go away. I have resolved to show my work to real other human people more. so. here.


End file.
